eSports and Competitive Gaming Study&colon; How competitive are we&quest;

In a recent study we conducted among Gamer Launch and GameSkinny users, we asked gamers about their attitudes towards virtual reality gaming (VR) and competitive gaming. If you’d be interested in seeing just what other gamers think about VR gaming, take a peek at my previous article!

For now, though, don’t you want to know what you’re up against? How do other gamers stack up?

We’re social gamers with a competitive streak

We’re all aware of the stereotype: A lone gamer clicking away in his parents’ basement. As we all know, though, we’re social creatures who enjoy pwning n00bs and raiding dungeons in the company of our friends and cohorts.

Gaming is really a social affair, when you get down to it.

About 61% of you are in some form of clan, guild, team, or kinship. That’s more than we thought! The rest of you are either Hunters or tend towards single-player games. There’s only so far you can get in a lot of games without some strategic cooperation (even if it is just tag-teaming through the hard parts in a single-player).

You love playing with and against other people. Surprisingly, though, most of you don’t care that much about your rank in PvP, even though you may be “pretty good.” You haven’t competed in any video game tournaments, but you might have friends who do. 61% of you do enjoy playing against friends in games like CS:GO, Hearthstone, Super Smash Bros or SMITE, though. Maybe you’re just not into the pro scene.

We’re watching You…

...Tube and Twitch.

About 45% of you watch eSports, PvP or some dude doing speedruns of Super Mario Maker on Twitch (sometimes with friends). The vast majority of you who do watch or play competitive games tend towards League of Legends, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, World of Warcraft, Hearthstone, and Dota 2, in that order. Other popular competitive games to watch or play are Heroes of the Storm, Call of Duty (any flavor), and SMITE. Predictably, most of these are MOBAs, but some of you WoW players just really don’t turn down for...anything (looking at you, @Rothalack). Note: This was a free-form answer, so there really are people who watch and play competitive Minecraft.

What we’re watching or playing

We’re going places!

Predictably, most of you who are interested in watching competitive gaming or eSports don’t attend any of the big in-person tournaments, but would rather watch from the comfort of your phone or computer. You do like going to the more broad-based conventions like PAX, E3, BlizzCon and local gaming cons. What’s not to love about a good con, though? (Besides the inevitable funk.)

And we want more. Like way more.

Even though you say that you don’t really care that much about how well you play, 58% of you want to see more tutorials and guides for amateur players. (Shh, we won’t tell that you’re trying.)

Speaking of seeing more eSports, we asked gamers if they’d want the oft-tried trend of mass media coverage to continue. Of all respondents, 37% would like to see more mainstream content about eSports and competitive video gaming. The other 63% were satisfied with the current state of content on this topic.

While some of you were wary of past TV network failures, a good number of you really would like to see more dedicated eSports coverage online, on dedicated TV channels, as a part of the regular TV programming, and on paid streaming services such as Netflix, Hulu and Amazon. Of particular concern is the lack of overseas coverage -- European, Australian, and Nordic gamers really want eSports coverage on their national TV channels. Many of you didn’t really care where you saw more coverage of eSports and competitive gaming, as long as there was more of it!